MIAMI – When it comes to heart health and women, hypertension remains one of the most common and important risk factors.
Dr. Maria Delgado, with the University of Miami Health System, helped create a certified hypertension program to help improve diagnosis and testing and treatment among women, as well as to raise greater awareness.
“In women between 30 and 50 years old, even blood pressures that are not ‘that high,’ put the patient at risk of more myocardial infarction compared to men. So hypertension for women literally means heart disease, if you look at it that way,” Delgado said.
About half of the population in the United States, both men and women, have hypertension, but data shows only one in four are adequately treated.
Also in today’s health news, taking aspirin after treatment for breast cancer did not reduce the risk of disease recurrence, according to a large randomized trial.
A lead researcher says the findings indicate that aspirin should not be used simply to prevent breast cancer recurrence, but because inflammation may still play a key role in cancer in general, aspirin could have different effects on other forms of the disease, such as colon cancer.
Researchers plan to conduct additional analyses on tumor and blood samples collected from the 3,000 patients in the study who had high-risk HER-2 negative breast cancer.